Sunset: The gods walk here

FindArticles > Sunset > Nov, 1998 > Article > Print friendly

The gods walk here

Matthew Jaffe

From the floor of Monument Valley, here on the border of Arizona and Utah, it's about a 1,000-foot climb to the flat summit of Hunts Mesa. That figure tells only part of the story.

It is said that the gods use the valley's mesa tops as steppingstones when they walk the Earth. I'm not sure the Navajo have a word comparable to hubris or chutzpah. But looking up at Hunts Mesa, with its red sandstone walls rising into the deep blue desert sky, I'm convinced we're pushing our luck, by any name.

Still, the opportunity to get a god's-eye view from atop rather than below one of Monument Valley's landmark formations seems too good to pass up. And so we set out in my photographer friend Tom's vintage Chevy Blazer, bouncing along the rhythm of the rutted road, trailing our Navajo guides. They're driving one of Monument Valley's traditional tourist vehicles: a pickup truck with rows of bench car seats mounted on the open bed. The word contraption will do.

As we venture into the backcountry, the guides seem intent on testing Tom's driving chops by taking routes through deep sand. We manage to reach the base of the mesa without getting stuck. We get out of our trucks. Our guides, David, Emmett, and Leonard, look up at the mesa's steep, sandstone face. They speak in Navajo, gesturing at possible routes. I follow their hands and struggle to identify the subtleties that distinguish the agreed-upon path from the remainder of the slickrock.

The initial ascent is simple: straight up a gradual, grooved slope. We begin to zigzag, tightroping along barely discernible ledges no wider than a boot, then climb hand-over-hand, dependent on foot- and handholds pecked into the rock 50 or 60 years ago.

In this fashion, we gain 400 feet before reaching a plateau. From here it's easy. The trail ascends furrowed sandstone and ankle-deep sand to lead us to the mesa top. As I hike, I resist the temptation to look back, saving my first glance for the summit.

I have seen Monument Valley hundreds of times. In John Ford's classic westerns, movies like Stagecoach and She Wore a Yellow, Ribbon, which turned these sandstone monoliths into iconic expressions of a mythic American West. In car ads and Road Runner cartoons.

But as I turn and look out, I see Monument Valley, perhaps for the first time. And somehow Monument Valley doesn't look like Monument Valley.

We stand, after all, above the monoliths. From this vantage point they seem smaller, less brooding, almost delicate and vulnerable: survivors, not victors. When you are on the valley floor, it swallows everything to become a world unto itself: up on top, we see Monument Valley as part of a larger realm, the Colorado Plateau.

Our view takes in a vast area of the Four Corners region, including landmarks like jagged Comb Ridge; according to Navajo lore, it is one of four arrowheads used to carve the Earth and today helps protect Navajo land. Seventy miles to the north are the twin 9,000-foot buttes known as the Bear's Ears - huge and imposing when we drove between them the day before, now faint silhouettes breaking the horizon.

Not that I really need any confirmation, but our Navajo guides provide some clues that this is not just any view. They too have brought cameras. With the valley in the background, they snap photos like any other tourist group.

"People always say they want to do a hike, but most of them turn around when they see what they have to climb," says David. "I've worked as a guide for 15 years. This is my second time up here."

One of the essentials to truly experiencing Monument Valley is to get over the notion that you know it. In some ways, the valley is so familiar as to be almost invisible. You can look at Monument Valley and see through it, straight back to your preconceptions.

The name itself suggests something dead, a misnomer on several counts. For one thing, the concept of monuments is foreign to the Navajo. They refer to the area as Tse' Bii' Ndzisgaii, or "changing of the rock."

That name is appropriate, because Monument Valley is still a living place. The sandstone formations - delicate spindly towers like the Yei Bi Chei dancers and stout buttes like Wetherill Mesa - are the 25-million-year-old remnants of hardened sediments deposited by ancient seas that covered most of the Southwest. Wind and rain, as well as temperature-driven contractions and expansions, conspired to wear away softer material. All that sand we battled on our way to Hunts Mesa is the residue of the massive mesas that once rose here.

This geologic evolution is by no means over. Come back in another million years or so and the buttes and towers will be gone. "There is no contract, no completion date," says retired geologist and onetime Monument Valley guide Gene Foushee. "It is ongoing."

Past the pressboard souvenir shacks near the highway and the even more ramshackle kiosks where tour operators try to entice customers, we meet Foushee at the tribal park visitor center. He had told us to look for a tall skinny guy of about 70 wearing a plaid shirt. We find him easily, although he is sporting a bright orange hooded sweatshirt to ward off the day's unexpected chill He still carries the accent of his native North Carolina and greets us with a voice as sweet as a country preacher's.

Foushee first visited Monument Valley 50 years ago. Then 19, he came out here with his father, driving the sand-track from the south. He had seen pictures of the formations in his geology textbook - scant preparation for an actual visit.

"We found a spot where we could pull off and not get stuck," he says. "We were a few miles southwest of Monument Pass. To the north was Eagle Rock Mesa and Brigham's Tomb, although we didn't know the names. We cooked supper and watched the sun go down. Then a waning full moon came up, creating these splendid silhouettes."

"So how did that affect you?" I ask.

"It blew me away, that's how it affected me," says Foushee. "I could not imagine a landscape such as that."

On the day we head out, Foushee seems no less passionate. At several stops, he drops into a crouch to eagerly trace our geology lessons in the soft, red sand. Billowing, threatening clouds move across the sky above the formations. Though the clouds are dark and purple, they also reflect a reddish sheen from the valley's ruddy rock.

Foushee tells us several times that we're quite lucky to catch the valley on a day with such an unsettled and lovely sky. "You start off with something extraordinary," he says. "So anything you add to Monument Valley makes it that much more spectacular."

Foushee has seen Monument Valley under all sorts of conditions. In 1959, he moved to Bluff, Utah, opened the landmark Recapture Lodge, and soon started guiding visitors into the valley.

Monument Valley tourism had started more than 30 years earlier, when rancher Harry Goulding arrived from Colorado in 1923 to run sheep. Goulding opened a trading post and later a lodge, turning his encampment into the closest thing Monument Valley has to a downtown.

By 1937 the valley was enduring the ravages of the Depression, and Goulding was desperate. He had heard that United Artists was planning to shoot a western and looking for a location. Armed with photos taken by friend and noted landscape photographer Josef Muench, Goulding and his wife, Mike, drove to Hollywood with $60 and no appointment.

In blue jeans and beat-up boots, Goulding arrived at the studio, only to be told he needed an appointment. He began spreading out his bedroll and, according to one account, said, "I can wait. I've lived among the Navajo so long that I don't get so busy that I can't wait.... I've got plenty of time, so I'll just stay here."

Within minutes, Goulding was showing his pictures to John Ford. Three days later, production began on Stagecoach in Monument Valley.

Ford eventually made nine films in the valley, although somehow it seems like more. Few directors have been so closely associated with a landscape. Ford loved running his own show, far away from the studio bosses - and in 1938, no spot in the United States lay farther from a railroad. The independent-minded director was able to reconfigure shots as he saw fit, using the valley to best scenic advantage. In this way, Ford helped define the myth of the West as landscape painters like Albert Bierstadt had so memorably a couple of generations earlier.

Wrote J. A. Place in The Western Films of John Ford: "The grandeur, beauty, and larger-than-life proportions necessary to an epic tale are offered by Monument Valley. Ford uses it as Homer used the sea. It is rather like the sea in its changes, its colors, its moods."

Or as Ford himself put it, "I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land."

Like John Wayne, the star of many Ford films, Monument Valley always played itself, even though none of the Ford movies were officially set here. The valley was Texas in The Searchers, Arizona in My Darling Clementine, and New Mexico in Stagecoach. Along for the ride, the local Navajo played Comanche, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Apache. In this way, for generations of moviegoers around the world, this valley came to stand for all the American West.

In his book Sacred Land Sacred View: Navajo Perceptions of the Four Corners Region, anthropologist Robert S. McPherson says Monument Valley's Mittens formations are said to be hands left behind by the gods as a sign that they will return one day. The thumbs form the pouring spouts of water barrels. Water is key in this dry land. According to one legend, Monument Valley is arid because people have climbed on Totem Pole Rock, said to be a prayer stick, thus offending the gods.

Today, the Arizona-Utah border runs between the Mittens and Sentinel Mesa. But the boundary is unmarked and largely irrelevant. Monument Valley is part of the Navajo Nation. This most classic American landscape is a Native American landscape: visitors from the outside world know they are in a foreign land.

The low, rounded shapes of the traditional Navajo dwellings known as hogans, careful assemblages of juniper and cedar covered by mud made of the valley's red soil, blend into the mesas that tower over them. Lean, ragged sheepdogs herd the flocks that have long been a mainstay of this tribe. When we visit, a community gathering known as an Enemy Way Ceremony is taking place in the backcountry; one guide we had hoped to hook up with cancels on us because he is taking his horses out to the dance.

In Navajo country, the traditional survives against the march of the modern. Sheepherders carry cellular phones even as their parents tell time by marking the movement of a shadow across a patch of sunlight on their hogan's floor. A basketball hoop sporting Michael Jordan's picture stands beside a traditional hogan. A Navajo teenager wears a Cleveland Indians cap emblazoned with the cartoonish Chief Wahoo, with no apparent sense of irony or indignation.

And while the Navajo were once famous for their horsemanship, today the truck does the real work. So with more than 900,000 miles on it and the kind of torque that newer vehicles can only dream of, my friend Tom's Blazer earns us considerable respect as we travel around Monument Valley.

"I want this truck," says Evelyn Yazzie Jensen, obviously impressed as Tom steers the Blazer up the bank of a wash. She has taken us out to a remote area adjacent to Monument Valley known as Mystery Valley.

We had met Jensen the day before at Oljato Trading Post. Ten miles west of Goulding's, Oljato actually predates the more famous trading post by a few years. Jensen bought the business eight years ago and is the first Navajo to own it. She was born and raised in a hogan at Black Mesa, where her mother still keeps a flock of sheep. One grandmother wove rugs. A grandfather appeared in some John Ford films, including Cheyenne Autumn.

"He was tall and handsome," says Jensen. "People used to refer to him as the Navajo John Wayne."

We head into the backcountry and end up in a terrain considerably different from Monument Valley. Monument's broad desert plains and crumbling monoliths have given way to more intimate valleys surrounded by broader, flatter slickrock mesas. The Navajo distinguish between the two terrains. Classic Monument Valley is the "land of standing rocks." Where we are is called the "spaces between the rocks."

As if determined to refill those spaces, a gritty sand-filled wind swirls about the rounded mesas. We climb to the top of sandstone arches, follow a set of dinosaur tracks, and explore Anasazi sites: Baby House ruin and its infant's foot- and handprint embedded in the floor; a petroglyph of a man pulling on a sheep, both in angled postures that suggest the strain of their tug-of-war; and the multiple handprint pictographs along the cliff above the remains of a spot called House of Many Hands.

The Monument Valley is said to have one of the highest concentrations of Anasazi sites anywhere. The Navajo, however, did not descend from the Anasazi. Instead, they may have arrived in Monument Valley as late as 1867, hundreds of years after the Anasazi had left the Four Corners area behind.

Jensen, too, has lived elsewhere but returned to Monument Valley to reconnect with her culture. Her own parents had abandoned traditional Navajo ways, and she relishes the chance to rediscover Navajo customs through her friendships with elders in Oljato.

"I'm definitely not here to get rich," she says. "Most of it has to do with the grandpas and grandmas. I try to spend as much time as possible with them. I have a sense of having my grandparents because I stay in touch with their ways. I find it quite helpful to have that guidance, just being in tune with the Earth."

She tells the story about an old Appaloosa mare with a two-week-old colt she had last seen one fall in a pasture out at Black Mesa. Jensen had hoped to bring the horses back down to a lower elevation, but winter came early. She feared the pair wouldn't survive.

Then in spring, while chasing cattle, she spotted some small hoofprints. Jensen heard a whinny and saw the colt.

"I approached him and he ran six circles around me," she recalls. "I started talking softly and stuck my hand out. He came over and sniffed it, and I thought to myself, 'I'm taking this baby home.' He followed me back, 8 miles."

Invariably in this land, you hear or see things that transcend simple explanation, be it in millions of years of geology, in the tale of a medicine man on John Ford's payroll who used to conjure the proper skies for the day's shoot, in the pure poetry of watching the light slide up one of the valley's sandstone turrets. Or in the near-miraculous survival, through a cold winter, of a young colt.

Strange, too, how in a place where the Earth is at its most spectacular, people resort to unearthly terms to describe it. John Wayne put it this way: "Monument Valley in 1938 was heaven." When I ask Gene Foushee about the valley in the late '40s, he, too, uses that word. Heaven.

I can't say for sure that Monument Valley in 1998 is heaven. I think it may be too dusty for that. But, I will say this. If the gods do walk anywhere on Earth, they walk here.